The Art of Life Mastery

In our last two posts about money, we presented our take of the money game, which is essentially the moving of zeroes from one account to another. Zeores coming in is a desirable outcome, and zeroes going out is an undesirable outcome. And the more zeroes in your account– or to be precise, in your control– the better! We asked you to take a look at that game, and determine whether it was a game worth obsessing over, losing sleep over, being stressed about. Sure, it is a game you may leverage to create certain outcomes in your world, but it need not consume you, as we know you have come to understand.

Now, there are essentially three ways to relate to any game. You can play the game, not play the game, or leverage the game.

Say you are at a party. Someone breaks out the Scrabble. If you love Scrabble, then you might play the game for the pleasure of playing it. If you do not like Scrabble, you might choose not to play. Or, whether you like Scrabble or not, you might see playing the game as an opportunity to get to know some of the other partygoers better. In the first case you are relating to the game by playing it, in the second by not playing it, and in the third by leveraging it to achieve some other purpose than the game was designed for.

Within the game of money are many mini-games. For example, consider the mortgage game. If owning a home inspires you, then you might happily play the mortgage game. As long as your mortgage isn’t taking away more zeroes than you’re bringing in, then the game is working, because it’s providing you with the home you desire.

If the idea of home ownership does not inspire you, then obviously you would not play the mortage game. You might play the renting game instead, or even the couch-surfing game. Or, if the mortgage game would take away more zeroes than you are bringing in, you would not play anyway, whether you want a home or not.

If you are using the mortgage game not as a means to afford a home (the purpose of the mortgage game), but with the primary intention of bringing in more zeroes, the you are leveraging the game. You may or may not be inspired to own a home, and you may not even like the mortgage game, but you play anyway because you can leverage the equity of your property to bring in more zeroes.

We see these as the three essential ways to relate to the mortgage game. We would say, if you are relating to the mortgage game in a particular way that is not working for you, stop relating to it that way. Move on to another relationship with the mortgage game that might work better. You can do so with grace and integrity if you choose, it need not upset your life too much. But playing a game after it has ceased to be fun is rather silly. It means that you have forgotten that it is just a game, after all. Nothing is more of a drag than when people just don’t know when to put the Scrabble away and get on with the rest of the party.

There is no game that you have to play. This is a daring statement, we understand, because there is a lop-sided focus on playing the requisite games in your culture. Advertisments, politicians and religious leaders are always saying, play this game! No, play this game! Play this one instead! You governments tell you that you must play their games, and so you all have government issued IDs and pay your taxes. The banks tell you that you must play their games, so you all have bank accounts, mortgages, investment portfolios and so on. Your food producers tell you that you must play their games, so you ingest insecticides and artificially altered DNA with your food. Your medical professionals tell you that you must play their games, so your vibrant children are made into zombies and your bodies are covered with surgical scars.

We ask you the same question that we asked about the money game. Are these games serving you? Are they good games? Is your relationship to these games moving your life forward, opening your hearts, awakening your minds?

We generally do not give revolutionary advice, but it’s only revolutionary if you believe that you MUST play certain games. Our revolutionary advice is this: if your relationship to any particular game is not working, change it to a relationship that does work.

If you are playing a game that is not working, consider leveraging the game. For example, perhaps the money game has made you unhappy, confused, and resentlful. All right, you don’t have to play anymore. But perhaps you might leverage certain aspects of it to suit your needs. It is not likely that you will choose not to play at all, but there are many in your world who have chosen that. They live in your monastaries, in your homeless shelters and remote villages.

Look at some of the mini-money games out there. Take your full-time job, if you have one. Is the game of trading your time, energy and attention for zeroes working for you? More importantly, is it fun? Is it bringing you joy, or are you inspried to bring joy to it? Are you waking up in the morning enthusastic about playing? If your answer to any of these questions is no, can you think of a new relationship to that mini-game that might work better for you? Can you leverage the game? Is it perhaps time to stop playing? Thousands of the wealthiest people on your planet got wealthy because they either leveraged or altogether stopped playing the “working for a living” game, which turned out to be their most powerful possible relationship to that particular game.

We invite you to take on this dialogue with yourself. If you do choose to change your relationship to a particular game, but you are not sure how to do it with integrity or in a way that will serve your life, we encourage you to find people who can assist. There are many fantastic money game coaches.

As you relate powerfully to the games of life, your inspiration, enthusiasm and vitality will grow. Wonderful!

Enough about money from us!

Michael

One of the most striking experiences I’ve had since being a Michael channel is how shockingly open to the phenomenon people in my life have been. Before I ever thought of being a channel, I would have guessed that the most frequent problem that channels might encounter are people who are very cynical about the phenomenon. Quite the contrary, I have yet to meet very many who have outright dismissed me when I share that I am a channel for Michael. There has been much healthy skepticism, but the biggest one of that bunch is always me.

I don’t know if more people are open and ready for the bigger and deeper Universe that channeling helps deliver, or if as a channel, I am simply attracting people who are aligned and interested. I’m thinking a little from column A, a little from column B.

Anyway I had promised to start addressing what has been the positive impact on my life so far of being a channel for Michael.

One impact has been a compulsion to deeply examine my “self.” For years I’ve been in an inquiry about what this thing is I call “me,” but never to such depth and precision since becoming a channel. When channeling, I don’t “go” anywhere (people often ask, where do you go?), but neither am I myself. I’m Michael! But as anyone who has witnessed the channel will tell you, I am most definitely not Michael, it is clearly a channeled phenomenon. When Michael is here, it’s obvious Eric is not. And vice-versa.

This stirs up many questions. What happens to the Eric that I know myself to be when I’m channeling? Who is the “I Am” who is Michael and not Eric when channeling? Who is the “I Am” that is Eric when not channeling? For that matter, who’s asking? Someone other than the “me” or “I am?” Wow, are there three of us now?

And on and on. But far from being flung into confusion, I’m actually becoming less confused. Following any of those questions down their winding trails has eventually ended either in absurdity or some sort of deconstructionist what-not. But this problem only arises when I feel like I have to have a solution… when I feel I must find an essential “I” or “me” in there somewhere, on pain of feeling terribly insecure.

What I’m coming to understand is that I don’t have to have a self, or a me, or an I Am, to be perfectly sane and happy. In fact, the less of any of those I identify with, the more peaceful, expanded, and joyful I become.

This greater sense of peace and joy, and a heightened sense of connection to the Universe as a whole, has been one of the greatest and as yet still unfolding results of being a Michael channel. Now, don’t misunderstand, like most human beings, I still spend most of my day mired in stinky feelings and completely enthralled by stinky little thoughts. If I’m to be enlightened in this lifetime, it will be by the usual means, and being a Michael channel will not be said to have contributed overly much.

A side note about these blogs. My relationship to the channel is a bit different with these blog entries than it is during personal channeling sessions. When I’m blogging for Michael, I don’t experience what I’d call a “full” channel, like I do in front of people. Michael is definitely present and feeding me the material, but it’s up to me to make the language flow. I get artistic license to word the messages in whatever way I think will communicate most clearly. When you read the blogs, you’re reading a hybrid of my way of putting things and Michael’s message. I always read and re-read the entries with Michael “standing over my shoulder” to make sure the communication is coming through accurately.

As for the line between my own wisdom and creativity as Eric, and Michael’s communications, it is fuzzy. Very fuzzy! And that doesn’t help my insecurity about the whole thing one bit. Where do I stop and Michael begins? But I tell you, the one who finds the compulsion to draw a definite distinction amusing and silly is Michael. Rather than directly  answer my (or anyone’s) question as to which part is Michael and which part is Eric, I’ve been taken on a direct and stunning journey into my own Self, which is causing such questions to become moot anyway. I’ll get more into that in my next blog entry about my own experience with Michael!

In the meantime, as I was writing this, Michael took the opportunity to jump in and create another blog about money. Go read it!

Eric

In our last entry about money, we pointed out that money is merely a measurement of past physical and mental exertion, and not the great determiner of human events or personal lives that it has been mistaken for. And while most people get that, quite a few are still hung up on the game of money. Of course, money may be merely a measuring tool, but a vast game has been built up around this measuring tool, and human beings are playing to win!

So, we would like to talk about the game of money. You know that money is a measurement, and regardless of the denomination of that measurement — dollars, pounds, pesos, and so on — every denomination is notated using numerals. The most important of those is the zero, since it’s the placeholder that separates the rich from the poor.

The game of money is, essentially, the moving of zeroes from one account to another. The object of the game is to have more zeroes than others are demanding from you. Most people try to accomplish this goal by creating a surplus of zeroes.

So that, if someone demands two zeroes from you, you have three zeros in stock. Or if many people demand lots of zeros totaling five zeroes at the end of the year, then you have at least six zeroes stashed away to cover their demands. You always want to be one zero ahead, because there are some inconvenient legal ramifications if you fall short, so best to plan ahead, eh?

When you have more than enough zeroes to cover the demands of others, then you feel happy. You may be the kind of person who feels he has won the game if he can maintain an extra zero at the end of the day, or quarter, or year. Or you may be the kind of person who doesn’t feel like she’s won unless she has seven or eight surplus zeroes. Depending on your temperment, you will feel you have won the money game roughly between one and thirteen surplus zeroes above the decimal point.

Now, how you get your zeroes can vary. If you are not very clever, or just lazy about being creative — or, more likely, you have been thoroughly duped by the hype around the money game — then you get your zeroes by trading your time and labor for them at a fixed rate. So many hours, so much physical exertion, equals so many zeroes after so many weeks. If you are observant, you may have noticed that some banks want to give you zeroes for free, and so you trade your signature for credit or a mortgage. Or you may have set up zero-making machines, in the form of investments, and you can sit back and let the zeroes roll in.

The fate of all those zeroes is to move electronically from one storage disk to another forever. Paper symbols are sometimes used, but those are ultimately accounted for electronically anyway. So really there is only one way you can manipulate your zeroes: transferring them away from your storage disk, and onto someone else’s storage disk. You can’t even transfer zeroes from someone else’s account into yours: they have to do it voluntarily, usually under tacit or explicit threat of legal action.

Do you see how simple this money game is? There is one playing field: electronic storage drives, and the interfaces that allow you to access them. There is one “piece”: zeroes. There are only two moves: transfer zeroes out of your account into some other account, and pressure someone into transferring zeroes from their account into yours. There is only one aim: have more zeroes in stock than people are demanding from you. And somewhere between one and thirteen extra zeroes above the decimal point, you may feel like you’ve won.

Anything else you do to play the money game is simply a variation of one of these elements.

Now, ask yourself, is this a good game? In other words, even though you may have to play now and then to forward certain commitments, is the money game worth playing for it’s own sake? Is it worth being worried or anxious about? Is it worth your undivided attention? Is it worth spending most of your waking hours to play? Is it worth passing on your frustration, confusion and anxiety to your children, so that when they become adults they can worry about it, be confused and frustrated about it, and spend most of their waking hours playing? Do you think that you can ever give your children enough zeroes that they will be free of this insanity?

As you consider these questions, we invite you to go back and read our first article about money. If you thoroughly digest what we’ve said in these two articles, you will be quite free of any suffering or confusion around money.

We are not moralizing. We are not saying you should or should not play the money game. We are not saying that money is a good thing or a bad thing. We are simply pointing out what money is and what it is not, what the money game is and what it is not.

You suffer over money because you have some funny ideas about what it is and how it works. Our intention in these two articles about money is to free you from that suffering. As with anything people suffer over, getting down to brass tacks on the issue will reveal it for what it is, eliminate ignorance, and alleviate suffering.

All suffering is caused by a misperception about What Is. So now you can get with What Is regarding money!

-Michael

While I get hold of and transcribe the recordings of the satsangs that Michael has been leading (it’s taking longer than I expected, due to other work interfering), I thought I’d introduce a new blog thread. A lot of people have asked me how channeling has changed my life. Do I practice Michael’s teachings? Do I consult with Michael personally? Am I more or less enlightened as a result of the experience?

At first I was surprised that anyone would want to know about that stuff, since I’m definitely not the star of the Michael show. But it occurs to me, of course people want to know stuff like that! When I first started reading Abraham material, all I wanted to do was sit down with Esther Hicks and ask her about her life. It mattered to me how she was relating to and exploring the messages of her own channel. What is the real human experience of Abraham’s messages, I wondered? Continue Reading »

Hi folks! Michael hasn’t blogged in a few weeks, so I wanted to fill the awkward silence by catching you up on what’s been happening with the Michael channel. In addition to a handful of small group and individual sessions, Michael has been hosting Satsangs here in Denver (see www.hearmichael.com). The Satsangs in particular are going wonderfully. Michael has also been invited to be interviewed on a radio show on July 4th. I’ll let you know where to tune in when that date approaches.

Michael does a funny thing. On a morning about a week before the next Satsang, Michael dumps the topic for the next Satsang on me while I’m in the shower. The little voice in my head, which is usually busy thinking about all the stuff I have to do that day, starts to channel the upcoming teachings. This happened a couple days ago, and I realized something as I was “listening” to this Satsang preview.

I had previously thought that Michael was just delivering random topics of interest in the Satsangs, but this is not the case. Michael’s teachings in this Satsang series are weaving together a profound teaching foundation. I imagine that Michael channels who have channeled other teaching systems, such as the overleaves/roles, have had similar experiences. Each Satsang teaching is building on the last, and they are beginning to culminate into very precise concepts, pointing to exactly the awakening experiences Michael wants to create for people.

For the next few blogs I am going to distill the essential points of the Satsang teachings from the recordings. I’ll keep the Michael channel open to make sure I’m communicating them effectively. This will allow those of you who are not local to get the foundations of Michael’s messages in this channel. Woo!

Expect the first release in a week or so.

Eric